Summary Of The Devil In The Shape Of A Woman By Carol Karlsen

“The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England,” written by Carol Karlsen, is a nonfiction book about the roles women played in colonial New England and why they were targeted solely in the witchcraft madness that plagued Massachusetts and Connecticut from 1630 to the 18th century. Karlsen states that most women who were accused of witchcraft were most likely seen as a threat to the social, economic, hierarchy, and demographic states of New England. Karlsen mainly wrote the book to explain the social structure of society during this time and how and why women were targeted as witches.

The book is also divided into three different sections that focus on different reasons as to why women were harassed as witches. The first part “immerses us in the world of New England witchcraft”

It basically said that in certain ways, women were disrupting the patriarchal culture. “However varied their background and economic positions, as women without brothers or women without sons, they stood in the way of an orderly transmission of property from one generation of males to another” (Karlsen 116). Karlsen also goes to say that “by the mid-1640s, signs of female independence had… become objectionable to the larger community” meaning that women were growing in terms of population and that threatened the men of colonial New England (Karlsen 197). Men and sons were upset that women were gaining land, and worried that there would not be enough for them: “resentments…were expressed as witchcraft accusations, primarily aimed at older women, who like accusers’ own mothers vied with men for land and other scarce material resources (Karlsen 217). Stephan Nissenbaum, co-author of Salem Possessed, goes to say that Karlsen takes "women strongly back to center stage, locating them in a rich patriarchal matrix that integrates it with class and family"